Original Summary

After Prime Minister Andy Burnham put Russia-linked disinformation campaigns under the spotlight, BBC Verify has been examining how these attempts to influence people's opinions work. We have tracked – and debunked – numerous online disinformation campaigns produced by Russia-linked groups that have attempted to shift public opinion on issues like the war with Ukraine, influence elections in the US and Germany, damage social cohesion and undermine trust in authorities or institutions. What kind of disinformation is being spread? In his UN speech, Burnham said there was an "insidious campaign" being carried out by the Russian government to target people in the UK. Last year, a series of fake videos featuring British public sector workers appeared online. Among them was a 999 call operator in Preston named Aaron, who told BBC Verify he was shocked to find out his voice had been cloned with AI to create a fake video of him talking about the 2025 Polish presidential election. British 999 call handler's voice cloned by Russian network using AI Those videos are part of a major Russian-linked disinformation campaign known as Matryoshka, which BBC Verify and other research groups have been tracking. AI is used to create fake videos - sometimes dozens a day - which impersonate journalists and major news organisations like the BBC to push disinformation about Ukraine and Western countries onto people's social media feeds. But Aaron's case indicates ordinary British citizens could also be a target. In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, BBC Verify reported how there was a shift in focus from Ukraine to post fabricated videos about the US election. We are once again seeing early evidence of similar misleading videos ahead of November's US midterm elections. BBC Verify has previously exposed a large-scale disinformation campaign run by a former US police officer now based in Russia. With the help of AI, the operation created hundreds of fake local news websites in the UK, US, France and other Western countries with the aim of spreading completely made-up stories. A screenshot of a fake local news website produced by a Russia-linked disinformation operation One of these was a fake news website called the London Crier which falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had bought a mansion owned by King Charles at a bargain price. It was seen by hundreds of thousands of users on X and shared by an official Russian embassy account. We also found that a fake AI-narrated video on YouTube was the source of the bogus story. The platform removed it after we reported it. And in 2023, BBC Verify found a major propaganda operation involving bogus accounts on TikTok, which posted misleading videos in multiple languages - including English - generating millions of views, with the aim of influencing the views of users in several European countries about the war in Ukraine. TikTok removed more than 12,000 fake accounts involved in the operation, saying its investigation indicated that the accounts originated from Russia. Screenshots of two TikTok videos falsely accusing Ukraine's former defence minister Oleksii Reznikov and his daughter of buying a luxury villa and a car Another campaign was discovered during the 2019 UK general election campaign when a trove of confidential documents about a possible trade deal between the UK and US was posted by an anonymous user on the platform Reddit and later used by the Labour Party in its campaign. While the documents appeared to be genuine, Reddit later confirmed in a statement the leak "was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia". But there are questions about how widespread or effective some of these disinformation campaigns are in reality. While many of them appear to be extensive and organised, it is hard to determine how widely they have spread or how significant a role they have played in actually influencing people. Do other countries sponsor disinformation campaigns? Russia is also not alone in using industrial-scale disinformation campaigns which spread false information to further its own geopolitical aims, as other authoritarian governments like China, North Korea and Iran are also major players in online disinformation. BBC Verify has previously reported on a number of X accounts posting in support of Scottish independence, but whose location information indicated they originated from Iran. And, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the BBC discovered a network of more than 1,200 faked or hijacked accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that posted pro-Chinese government and anti-US messages. There is evidence to suggest Western governments also engage in disinformation campaigns, although the scale of their operations are not always clear. An investigation by Reuters in 2024 revealed that during the Covid pandemic, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation to discredit China's Sinovac jab. And Meta has previously removed an influence campaign originating from France that targeted a number of countries in Africa. AI has also exacerbated the spread of disinformation, as images can now be more easily faked and videos misleadingly edited using text prompts. Text generation has also improved and can create plausible, authoritative and coherent sounding fake news reports. BBC Verify saw evidence of this during US-Israel war with Iran. While in the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict most of the disinformation published online consisted of old or misleading videos and inaccurate claims, we have seen a deluge of AI-generated images and videos since the Iran war began back in February of this year. Carl Miller, an author and founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, told BBC Verify that state-run influence operations "amplify and exploit existing grievances and fissures - making it really hard to work out exactly what sort of effect they might have". "Influe

中文概览

中文标题： 伯纳姆指责俄罗斯散布网络虚假信息，BBC核查其依据

BBC Verify核查俄罗斯关联虚假信息行动，包括用AI克隆英国999接线员声音、冒充媒体、建假新闻网站，试图影响乌克兰战争、美欧选举及社会信任。但这些行动的影响范围和效果仍难确定。

  • 情报分类：综合情报
  • 分类依据：网络虚假信息与地缘政治，归综合情报
  • 信息来源：英语新闻 / BBC News Top Stories
  • 发布时间：2026/9/24 00:35:11